Gears of War: Judgment review: More of the different

Or: What a COG feels when the leash breaks.

Game Details

Developer: Epic, People Can FlyPublisher: Microsoft Game StudiosPlatform: Xbox 360Release Date: March 19, 2013Price: $59.99Links:Official website | Xbox Marketplace | AmazonEveryone acts differently around their parents. Whether it’s a slight change in the octave of their voice or a dramatic emotional regression, no one acts the same around the people who raised them for 18 years. Gears of War: Judgment seems susceptible to this phenomenon—this is, after all, the first Gears away from its production mommy and daddy. Gears has always been developed internally by Epic Games in North Carolina, but Judgment is the product of Polish studio People Can Fly. PCF is owned by Epic and is best known for the Painkiller series and 2011’s Bulletstorm, so this change isn't severe enough to scare the crimson-omen tattooed masses of fans. There’s still more testosterone and over-the-top violence than you can shake a chainsaw bayonet at. Judgment feels like traditional Gears, but it’s changed dramatically in a number of ways. Many of the alterations were successful, but others miss the mark.

PCF faced a real tricky situation. Gears of War has always been somewhat of a guilty pleasure; it’s big, it's loud, it's dumb. But seven years and three games since its debut, the series is between a rock and a hard place. It can’t just keep pushing all the machismo and expletives the series is known for without feeling a bit stale. It also can’t alienate the fans who have built the franchise into the multi-billion dollar behemoth that it is. So Judgment mixes it up enough that the game feels fresh and new while retaining plenty of familiarity for series devotees. There are going to be people decrying the game because it isn’t the same as it always was, but they’re shortsighted and wrong.

New look, new controls, new mission structure

Gears of War always looks depressing; everything’s desaturated to the point of being nearly devoid of color. Gears 3 experimented with chroma here and there, but there were still extended sections of brown, gray, and rampant desaturation. It’s boring to look at and even more boring to play through for hours at a time.

Judgment, by contrast, is by far the most visually interesting game of the franchise, and it's constantly mixing up its visual themes. Primary colors flourish in almost every level, and paired with relentlessly shifting gameplay, it kept me interested and excited throughout. There's a strong, apparent influence from Bulletstorm, which had a rich, pulp-comic color palette to help set it apart from its boring, dingy earth-toned modern combat first-person shooter peers.

Again, Judgment still feels like Gears, but there are a few concessions made in the name of accessibility. This installment's controls feel more like a typical third-person shooter than a past Gears of War game. No, the active-reload meta-game hasn’t vanished, but the option to use the d-pad to switch between weapons has disappeared. There are other small interface changes, too: Judgment limits you to carrying two weapons and one grenade type at a time; grenades throw faster and are mapped to the left bumper by default; and ammo packs from enemies are picked up automatically.

Everything feels lithe and trim, but these changes can still be off-putting. The standard Gears controls have been hardwired into my brain over the past seven years, and even toward the end of Judgment I was still hitting the wrong buttons on the controller. I’m mostly OK with this, but it's a controversial decision that could divide the audience and even drive some away.

But the biggest change from Gears games past is how each mission is structured. Judgment eschews the traditional Gears progression: cutscene to walking-slowly-with-fingers-affixed-to-an-in-ear-communicator to blowing-stuff-up. Instead, we get a courtroom story featuring Kilo Squad, led by series fourth-fiddle Lieutenant Damon Baird, testifying before a military tribunal about their exploits. Each of the four members has their own testimony, narrating the action as the player follows along and pulls the trigger. Each memory follows a strict blueprint: a few lines of dialog set up the action, then players choose a difficulty or gameplay modifier, enter a room, and kill all the things. Afterward, a mission-recap leaderboard pops up. Rinse, repeat.

Each firefight is its own self-contained mission, taking between five and 15 minutes to finish. There are several battles per chapter and roughly seven chapters for each character’s testimony, adding up to just under 16 hours for my run through the solo campaign (your mileage may vary, of course). Unlike previous Gears games, there aren’t long bouts of running with nothing to shoot (these sections always made you realize just how lethargic locomotion is). The action is more or less constantly delivered to the player, and it hits fast and hard. This keeps the pace moving along at a fast clip that prevents the game from ever feeling like a slog to the next big encounter or set-piece.

That's partly because there aren’t any such big events. Save for the final boss fight, large-scale blockbuster shenanigans don’t exist in Judgment (and even that single boss is relatively small compared to what populated prior Gears games). It sounds like sacrilege for a series built on jaw-dropping scale and sheer spectacle to scrap these elements, but the payoff is a game that feels more even—each fight feels unique and important. I’ll take a consistent, awesome experience over an undulating grind through dull firefights punctuated by some drawn-out, massive boss battle any day of the week.

Memorable modifiers, forgettable story

Efficient play can unlock “Declassified” modifiers that alter the squad-member’s testimony, adding wrinkles to each “memory” and increasing the difficulty or altering the gameplay in some way. Opting to declassify an encounter nets you more mission-rating stars, which in turn unlock weapon customizations and character skins for multiplayer.

There's a good bit of variety and invention in the modifiers. They're never as one-dimensional as “enemies are impervious to ballistic weapons,” or the like. Instead, you get new challenges like “finish the area in under four minutes before the university’s poison gas defense goes off” or “strong winds kicked up dust, limiting visibility and making movement difficult.” Far from being tacked on, these modifiers end up adding a lot of replay value to what could have been quite monotonous.

Even without the modifiers, Judgment's mission structure is never dull. On one mission, Kilo squad has to take out snipers dug in to an elevated riverbank. After dispatching those goons, they huddle into a slow-moving and totally exposed freight elevator up the opposite side of the ravine, only to have snipers firing at them from across the river. Another mission features an extended mortaring sequence, and yet another throws in a Normandy Beach-style invasion for good measure. Did you like Gears of War 3’s tower defense infused Horde mode? There are a handful of missions like that here, too. Mission variety isn’t the exception in Judgment;it’s the rule.

Enemy types and locations aren’t static, either. Each time an area is played, the enemy types can vary dramatically. One time I was overrun by a pack of locusts riding on some grub-like beast of burden and had to reload the last checkpoint. Upon reloading, the enemy wave changed to a legion of rocket-launcher wielding Boomers, forcing me to change tactics and reappraise the situation. For a game with such a strong multiplayer focus, this will help keep the game fresh for a long time—especially if your co-op crew doesn’t care to battle against strangers online.

The story generally stays out of the way of the tight gameplay, but this may be because it's completely forgettable. This isn’t anything new for the series, but much was made of hiring Tom Bissell (journalist, author, and very vocal critic of narrative presentation in gaming) to write Judgment’s script. After finishing the campaign and what amounts to an on-disc Gears of War 3 “lost” mission (tying Judgment’s new characters into Gears’ established lore), I was hard-pressed to recount anything remarkable about the story.

The dialog is slightly less infantile and expletive-laden this time around, but character development is practically nil. All I know about franchise newcomers Sofia and Paduk is that one is a super-green cadet and the other is a Cold-War era Russian caricature, respectively. And coverboy Baird? I can’t remember anything he did in the first three games, and I still didn’t know him any better or care about him any more after Judgment’s credits rolled.

Mixed Multiplayer

For those who argue that no one plays Gears for the campaign, here’s where I talk about multiplayer. The servers aren’t fully populated as I write this, so my pre-release experience is going to differ a bit from post-release online matches. That said, I grouped up with a handful of other members of the press or went solo with random strangers to sample each of the multiplayer suites.

Adversarial multiplayer’s shining star is “Overrun,” a mash-up of Horde and Beast modes from Gears 3 with a few twists. It's an asymmetrical class-based-objective mode pitting locust against human defenses. With each victory—or defeat—the teams move to a different location on a map. Humans have to fortify their bases in real-time against all variety of locust trying to destroy the objective. Each map is incredibly well-designed, with plenty of chokepoints and sections that play to the strengths of each locust enemy type. The diminutive Tickers can scuttle through crawlspaces inaccessible to other locust types and can generally make the opposing team have a very bad day, if used properly. Overrun scratches an itch I’ve had since my friends stopped playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2’s Rush mode a few years ago, and it's an itch I'll definitely keep scratching.

Plain old multiplayer Horde mode isn’t available in Judgment, which is all the more curious considering how many elements of the mode weave into the campaign. The new Survival mode doesn’t cut it as a replacement, either; it boils down to ten waves of Overrun against bots instead of human players. It's possible People Can Fly left the mode out because they felt they couldn't change it enough to feel like a proper innovation, but in that case, what was the point of carrying team deathmatch along for the ride? Free-for-all mode is COG-on-COG action that's as boring as it sounds, and it feels out of place in a series that’s always had a team-based or tactical bent.

People Can Fly’s take on Gears is unmistakable. It doesn’t feel like the Marcus Fenix trilogy that came before it, but this game's newness isn’t always for the better. Judgment’s outstanding gameplay comes at the expense of story, and for some that will be a major sticking point. Gears of War 3 was an over-polished AAA shooter designed for everyone to love, with nary a rough edge in sight. Judgment is riskier, and it's not afraid to flaunt its differences and its charms. But in many ways, Judgment feels hamstrung by legacy, regressing back to old patterns and behaviors. Instead of taking risks in story and multiplayer in the ways the campaign’s gameplay did, it feels like its parents are still around.

The Good:

Faster gunplay and movement just feels better than previous games

Wide color palette and mission variety keeps the game from feeling monotonous

Overrun mode is an addictive blast

The Bad:

Forgettable story and underdeveloped characters leave a lot to be desired

Remapped controller functions seven years in take some getting used to

That you found the earlier Gears games, "big, loud, and dumb" and "boring to play through" gives me pause when considering your judgment about Judgment.

However, I think I may end up agreeing with your assessment. That the campaign now apparently plays more like a competitive arcade experience (with leaderboards after each mission) will no doubt kill the immersion and limit any real engagement with story for me.

That the campaign now apparently plays more like a competitive arcade experience (with leaderboards after each mission) will no doubt kill the immersion and limit any real engagement with story for me.

That's just PCF's mark on the series - wasn't it the same with Bulletstorm?

That you found the earlier Gears games, "big, loud, and dumb" and "boring to play through" gives me pause when considering your judgment about Judgment.

However, I think I may end up agreeing with your assessment. That the campaign now apparently plays more like a competitive arcade experience (with leaderboards after each mission) will no doubt kill the immersion and limit any real engagement with story for me.

Almost nobody cares about the "story" in an action video game.

Developers are finally starting to realize this.

I guess I am one of those nobodies. I play Halo primarily for the campaign. Do not even have xbox live hooked up. I have always had a lot of fun playing local co-op campaign. Even though online multiplayer is the staple now, there is something quite unique and fun about playing with a buddy on the same screen.

My biggest beef with Judgement is that most of its content was initially slated to be extra DLC content for Gears 3. I would have more than happy to plunk down $12-15 for the epilogue campaign, but I don't want to pay $60 for a new game that seems to have left behind any of the appeal that Gears had for me in the first place.

I guess I get to save my money. Also that money I had set aside for Fortnight.

That the campaign now apparently plays more like a competitive arcade experience (with leaderboards after each mission) will no doubt kill the immersion and limit any real engagement with story for me.

That's just PCF's mark on the series - wasn't it the same with Bulletstorm?

And Painkiller... very very much so. Mind you, it worked extremely well in Painkiller, because they didn't need to justify the fact you went from fighting in 300-foot-tall cathedrals to abandoned military bases to Venice to opera houses, you just did. They also managed to have a gray-brown color pallete and still have a fantastic visual variety (because, again, you could go from fighting at the tower of Babel to giant chasm-spawning bridges in a single mission).

From what little I've played of Gears of War (which, admittedly, is *extremely* little) that style would seem to fit perfectly, but I could just be missing a lot of stuff that was in the game, I don't know.

Darn, first Halo 4 without Firefight, and now Gears Judgement without Horde? What's next - Call of Duty without multiplayer? Congress without gun control? Fox News without idiocy? Soda without high fructose corn syrup?

Loved the first one. Second and third meh. Now that I have to split time between adult responsibilities (proper adult, not pr0n adult) and gaming I'll just have to reserve my bandwidth (not proper bandwidth, mental/temporal/schedule bandwidth) for Bioshock: Infinite.

That you found the earlier Gears games, "big, loud, and dumb" and "boring to play through" gives me pause when considering your judgment about Judgment.

However, I think I may end up agreeing with your assessment. That the campaign now apparently plays more like a competitive arcade experience (with leaderboards after each mission) will no doubt kill the immersion and limit any real engagement with story for me.

Almost nobody cares about the "story" in an action video game.

Developers are finally starting to realize this.

I guess I am one of those nobodies. I play Halo primarily for the campaign. Do not even have xbox live hooked up. I have always had a lot of fun playing local co-op campaign. Even though online multiplayer is the staple now, there is something quite unique and fun about playing with a buddy on the same screen.

I play games for the story, too. I'm that kind of nerd. I grew up on story-based games like Metroid and Zelda (stories that seemed big and exciting to an 8 year-old, at least). That's why the first few Halos and the Bioshock franchise really do it for me.

Of course, that doesn't explain my 5 year Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes2 addiction but whatever, anomalies.

Darn, first Halo 4 without Firefight, and now Gears Judgement without Horde? What's next - Call of Duty without multiplayer? Congress without gun control? Fox News without idiocy? Soda without high fructose corn syrup?

Ugh. Don't even get me started on Halo4. Suffice to say that I'm, ahem, downloading Halo1 from a few friends as we speak. No matter how many derivative maps they make, nothing beats a 16-player Blood Gulch battle or an 8-player rockets-only meatgrinder on Longest.

That you found the earlier Gears games, "big, loud, and dumb" and "boring to play through" gives me pause when considering your judgment about Judgment.

However, I think I may end up agreeing with your assessment. That the campaign now apparently plays more like a competitive arcade experience (with leaderboards after each mission) will no doubt kill the immersion and limit any real engagement with story for me.

Almost nobody cares about the "story" in an action video game.

Developers are finally starting to realize this.

That's nonsense, sorry. Story may be only one of several reasons to enjoy an "action" video game, but memorable story, fictional universe, and well realized characters are what makes a campaign experience worth playing for many of us. It's also what drives the popularity of franchise spinoffs such as novels and films. Without this, you might as well skip the campaign and go straight to multiplayer, like most COD players I know.

That you found the earlier Gears games, "big, loud, and dumb" and "boring to play through" gives me pause when considering your judgment about Judgment.

However, I think I may end up agreeing with your assessment. That the campaign now apparently plays more like a competitive arcade experience (with leaderboards after each mission) will no doubt kill the immersion and limit any real engagement with story for me.

Almost nobody cares about the "story" in an action video game.

Developers are finally starting to realize this.

That's nonsense, sorry. Story may be only one of several reasons to enjoy an "action" video game, but memorable story, fictional universe, and well realized characters are what makes a campaign experience worth playing for many of us. It's also what drives the popularity of franchise spinoffs such as novels and films. Without this, you might as well skip the campaign and go straight to multiplayer, like most COD players I know.

I agree. The only reason most players think that there isn't a story or a world is because they're too busy looking for someone to shoot to stop and patiently pay attention to whats around them. Gears actually has a pretty deep well of lore if you bother to pay attention to the details given around you, in the dialog, and in the collectables. For every game that doesn't do this (cough CoD cough) there is a game that does, but everyone likes to complain that there wasn't a story.

I once watched a roommate of mine skip all the intros, including the briefing, to a game of mine he'd borrowed, only to complain in the first minute that "the game didn't make any sense" and he "didn't know what he was supposed to do."

bland story, then i'm not going to dig it. I need a good campaign whether the game is supposed to be multiplayer or not. otherwise it's just any other multiplayer shooter with different skins and weapons - and there are plenty of that doing the exact same thing.

There are going to be people decrying the game because it isn’t the same as it always was, but they’re shortsighted and wrong.

Now, I don't have any strong feelings about the Gears of War franchise either way, but that sentence really put me off.

You basically say that anyone disagreeing with your views about the game is wrong. That's not a good way to express your opinion in a professional article. (And I should know, I used to write articles for a living.)

Picked up Gear yesterday after trying the demo and saw some friends had done the same. By the time I installed and logged in there were about 5000 players on overrun and 11000 in team deathmatch. So a pretty good start so far.

I would definitely try out the demo (xbox) if possible as your experience pulls right over into the full version of the game. As soon as I popped the retail version in I received 2 achievements just from leveling up in the demo. Also the demo lets you get used to the controls before your "stats" start counting (for all you stat mongers). As well the retail game right now lets you download the first Gears for free.

I didn't see the controls as a big issue as it looks like there is starting to be a standard for FPS (yes I know this is 3rd person, but you get the point). I think we would all like to see more mapable button options on the console, but in this case Gears does force you into only a few options. There is however a legacy mode which might be more in tune with the older control options.

I thought the game play was good in the multiplayer and we were able to get into the lobby and game very quickly, no server problems here. After several hours of game play I couldn't find any obvious major bugs or issues, maybe just a couple of small minor UI inconveniences that do not affect game play and usually can be ironed out after the first patch.

Overall I would recommend this game for my friends with no problem. Has massive replay value. No obvious components missing or half done. And I can see us putting in some real hours on multiplayer.

PS: Go ahead and play the demo! From what I understand you have until around March 29th for your XP to transfer.

That you found the earlier Gears games, "big, loud, and dumb" and "boring to play through" gives me pause when considering your judgment about Judgment.

However, I think I may end up agreeing with your assessment. That the campaign now apparently plays more like a competitive arcade experience (with leaderboards after each mission) will no doubt kill the immersion and limit any real engagement with story for me.

Almost nobody cares about the "story" in an action video game.

Developers are finally starting to realize this.

I guess I am one of those nobodies. I play Halo primarily for the campaign. Do not even have xbox live hooked up. I have always had a lot of fun playing local co-op campaign. Even though online multiplayer is the staple now, there is something quite unique and fun about playing with a buddy on the same screen.

I play games for the story, too. I'm that kind of nerd. I grew up on story-based games like Metroid and Zelda (stories that seemed big and exciting to an 8 year-old, at least). That's why the first few Halos and the Bioshock franchise really do it for me.

Of course, that doesn't explain my 5 year Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes2 addiction but whatever, anomalies.

Tribes 2 was an awesome game. I really wish someone would port to console. I didn't realize that Dynamix made so many of the games I played. Then I didn't realize that Dynamix made Stellar 7, which I played. However, I did realize that I'm getting older.

Four multiplayer maps, the removal of a mode that Gears made popular, a complete control scheme change for more "Call of Duty" like gameplay, a forgettable linear story with characters who are subdued, and extremely shady DLC practices out of the gate?

This is the culmination of the loss of several key Epic developers (CliffyB, Rod Ferguson), the acquisition of PCF, the loss of PCF's original founder, and Microsoft pushing to keep their increasingly limited number of "exclusive" IPs relevant.

That you found the earlier Gears games, "big, loud, and dumb" and "boring to play through" gives me pause when considering your judgment about Judgment.

However, I think I may end up agreeing with your assessment. That the campaign now apparently plays more like a competitive arcade experience (with leaderboards after each mission) will no doubt kill the immersion and limit any real engagement with story for me.

Almost nobody cares about the "story" in an action video game.

Developers are finally starting to realize this.

I guess I am one of those nobodies. I play Halo primarily for the campaign. Do not even have xbox live hooked up. I have always had a lot of fun playing local co-op campaign. Even though online multiplayer is the staple now, there is something quite unique and fun about playing with a buddy on the same screen.

I play games for the story, too. I'm that kind of nerd. I grew up on story-based games like Metroid and Zelda (stories that seemed big and exciting to an 8 year-old, at least). That's why the first few Halos and the Bioshock franchise really do it for me.

Of course, that doesn't explain my 5 year Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes2 addiction but whatever, anomalies.

Tribes 2 was an awesome game. I really wish someone would port to console. I didn't realize that Dynamix made so many of the games I played. Then I didn't realize that Dynamix made Stellar 7, which I played. However, I did realize that I'm getting older.

A startup game shop went live with a sequel called Tribes:Ascend last year. They say it was based on Tribes2. I played for about 3 hours then killed the VM I had it running on in disgust. It's nothing like Tribes2 other than a vague art resemblance, jetpacks and skiing. Skiing is a big part of the game, and they kept going on and on about how it would be, but that's it. The game mechanics sort of resemble Unreal:Tournament with Tribes names for weapons and the use of jetpacks. They also had this awful system in place where it was free to play but you had to unlock weapons and armor abilities with either money or game achievements.

I really just want a game shop to redo Tribes2 with modern graphics (but using the same game engine, though).